Six Kids In, One Kid Out

June 13, 1994

There was no crisis in Illinois child welfare last week. At least, not the kind of crisis everyone's used to hearing about. No headlines about children dying at the hands of abusive parents, no situations compared to the poverty of Calcutta.

No, it was just a run-of-the-mill kind of crisis week for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. And that's a story in itself.

As the Tribune's Rob Karwath reported, DCFS will set new records this year for the number of children placed in its care and the number of reports received through its child abuse and neglect hotline. The agency has an unprecedented 40,522 children in state custody, about equal to the population of Elmhurst.

Much attention has rightly focused on the tragedies at DCFS, such as the death of Joseph Wallace and the discovery of the 19 children living in squalor on North Keystone Avenue. Perhaps not enough attention has been focused on what happens to kids once they're in the agency's care.

DCFS is setting new records for the number of kids entering the system. It is setting no records for the number of children leaving the system. In the last 11 months, DCFS has taken 7,876 children into protective custody. In that time, it has released fewer than 1,300 children from the system.

So for every six children who come in, just one leaves.

That's not the way it's supposed to work. The child welfare system is designed to protect children who are being abused and neglected, but it isn't designed to keep those children until they become adults. That becomes the case when the agency doesn't move with deliberate speed to make the tough decisions about whether a child can be reunited with a parent or should be made available for adoption.

There's the real crisis: More kids flood into the system each month while just a lucky few trickle out.